Lucy Bain

lucybain.com

Overview

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I’m an experienced developer team lead that drives results and pushes for the best outcomes for customers and the team. I facilitate discussions, coordinate multiple projects, and have a high quality bar so we ship better features, faster. I also enjoy coaching my team members to help them achieve more, learn along the way, and progress their career. Finally, I pride myself on my ability to clarify and share context and my willingness to tackle difficult conversations with peers and team members in the interests of the company.

Experience

Senior Team Lead

Atlassian (Editor Platform)
August 2019 - Current
  • Started a new team of seven developers, which peaked at 11 people, specialising in TypeScript, React, and ProseMirror
  • Coordinated multiple projects with other teams and across the company. Main projects: unblocking the editor’s rollout in Confluence; monitoring and improving typing performance; supporting work for inline comments
  • Instigated Agile culture and structure to the team which evolved the team from scrappy "settlers" team to a team of "town planners"; this involved me running and training others to run: kickoffs, planning session, retrospectives, regular backlog grooming, etc.
  • Stabilised the team through a tumultuous period (through Covid-19, product manager changing four times, and designer changing three times in 18 months)
  • Continued to be active in the Atlassian women’s community by coordinating three external workshops and participating in a mentoring program

Team Lead

Atlassian (Bitbucket Server)
March 2017 - August 2019
  • Grew a team from four to eight developers (a mix of front and backend developers)
  • Encouraged professional growth and career development of team members by giving frequent feedback, coordinating stretch opportunities, and connecting weekly
  • Transitioned team from Kanban to Scrum practices to improve estimations and delivery reliability
  • Collaborated with the product manager and designers to define and clarify features including project level admin, personal access tokens, and filtering repositories

Developer

Atlassian (Bitbucket Server)
Feb 2015 - March 2017

JavaScript (ES6), Less, React, Redux

  • Built the front end for features such as a repository importer, personal dashboards, and refactored code for notifications
  • Led the development of the tags feature by working with designers and backend developers as well as implementing the front end
  • Introduced pair programming as a method to share things we learned, decrease time for code review, and spread knowledge about the codebase, and quality expectations
  • Organised and ran many diversity efforts, including facilitating mentor rings for women, holding events to foster a sense of community

Web Developer

BetterBills (Split It)
May 2013 - Feb 2015

Ruby on Rails, RSpec, MongoDB, JS, CSS

  • Developed primarily on the backend for client facing sites (both our own and white labeled) by designing RESTful APIs for consumption by our sites
  • Wrote unit, integration, and acceptance tests for code to improve long term maintainability
  • Pair programmed to discover, implement, and communicate code standards among the team

Backend Web Developer

AVOS
Nov 2011 - May 2013

Ruby on Rails, RSpec, JS, Python, Django

  • Developed new features in Ruby on Rails and Python for multiple web apps including delicious.com
  • Learned Ruby on Rails on the job when the company moved away from Python and Django

Software Engineer Intern

Synactive
July - Oct 2011

C++, Objective-C

  • Built new features for our next release and saw them through QA
  • Developed a prototype iPhone application to transfer data asynchronously using Objective-C, and process that data with the company’s C++ library

Education

University of Mary Washington

BSc Computer Science, Honors
Aug 2007 - May 2011

For my honors project:

  • Researched and improved knowledge search for scholarly articles with a team
  • Authored and presented final thesis for departmental honors

Community

Coach

Oct 2020 - Current

Organiser

Girl Geek Dinner, Women Who Code, Rails Girls
April 2014 - March 2020
  • Coordinated Rails Girls workshops for 40+ attendees and 15+ mentors, including finding sponsors, a venue, and mentors, advertising for applicants, and providing food and drinks
  • Developed, documented, and mentored future leaders in the process for organising a Rails Girls event
  • Hosted or ran over 15 workshops for Women Who Code, including a workshop to come up with conference proposals and open sourced the worksheet (lucybain.com/blog/2016/proposal-ideas-workshop/)
  • Mentored and coordinated mentors for new or unconfident speakers to present at Girl Geek Dinners

Public speaking

August 2014 - March 2020
  • Opened KiwiPyCon 2016 with a keynote presentation for over 150 attendees on “What’s holding you back from connecting with others?” at Kiwi PyCon (youtube.com/watch?v=AI_TA6jgBYY)
  • “Meet Git” - an introduction to Git for a non-technical audience given at Atlassian Design week (vimeo.com/163127177)
  • “Lessons from a study group” given at PyCon Australia (youtube.com/watch?v=JIgjHcgh1CQ)
  • Gave regular presentations at the local General Assembly on Git and my experience being a programmer
  • Lead workshops and introduced events frequently as part of Women Who Code and Rails Girls

Study groups

Leader, Mentor
February 2014 - November 2016
  • Created and led a group to practice JavaScript that attracted 40 registrations
  • Led an introduction to programming course in Python (lucybain.com/python)
  • Organised study groups for more advanced Python, debugging, and interview practice
  • Implemented an incentive based payment system to encourage members to attend